If Theresa Rebeck’s furious office comedy “What We’re Up Against” had come along at some other recent moment — had it opened at WP Theater even a couple of months ago instead of just this week — it would have been easy to dismiss as an overblown relic of an age, 25 years ago, when women in traditionally male fields really had the deck stacked against them. And even then, was it all that bad?

What a difference a global scandal makes. Since early October, when the public cascade of sexual abuse allegations against the producer Harvey Weinstein began, a fresh awareness of rampant misogyny has stripped the veneer of meritocracy from the workplace. Suddenly “What We’re Up Against” — written in 1992, not long after Anita Hill testified in the Senate, accusing the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment — feels both cathartic and clarifying, a map of a minefield drawn in bold cartoon colors.

Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, Ms. Rebeck’s play isn’t, as it happens, about sexual harassment. It’s about all of the other ugly ways that a woman can be foiled and dismissed, ostracized and worn down, when she’s just trying to do her job. It’s also about what happens when she dares to show her anger, fighting back against being shut out.

Talented and ambitious, Eliza (Krysta Rodriguez) is a new architect at a firm whose unseen owner, David, hired her for her excellent mind. (They must be sleeping together, right? Everyone says so.) She’s not as recent an arrival, though, as Weber (Skylar Astin), a sycophantic blowhard whose abundant lack of talent doesn’t keep him from being assigned to project teams. Eliza, meanwhile, sits in her shamefully small office with nothing to do.

“When the experience is there, she’ll be put on projects,” the villainous team leader, Stu (Damian Young), says, swilling a drink at his glass-top desk. “She wants to know how she can get the experience if she’s not on a project. This is a good question. And so I tell her: Initiative.”

That is garbage, of course — we’ve already heard him call her a sexist slur that can’t be repeated here — and anyway Stu is outraged at Eliza’s initiative. As the play opens, she has just tricked him by putting Weber’s name on a design of her own, then asking Stu to explain what makes it so good. After he fell for it, she said it was hers.

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Krysta Rodriguez (with Mr. Astin) is a new hire struggling to be taken seriously, in a play that was written in the wake of the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

“This is what we’re up against,” Stu grouses, retelling the tale.

Perhaps best known now as the deposed creator of “Smash,”Ms. Rebeck has long made her way through the man’s world of both theater and television. I remember hearing a male theater director, years ago, disparage her in glaringly misogynistic language — a tipoff that his judgment reflected him more than her. So she understands this terrain from the inside.

As sitcomish as it sometimes feels, “What We’re Up Against” has a complex view of its characters and their dynamics. Janice (Marg Helgenberger) has been at the firm for years, and before Eliza’s arrival she was its only woman architect. (The unseen support staff is, she notes, all female.)

Janice recognizes the structural flaws in the office culture, but like a lot of people who find themselves the sole representative of a demographic group, she opts not to dwell on them. She gets along by not threatening the men — keeping her expectations low, her comments flattering and her work mediocre. Also, she dresses like a librarian. (The costumes, which don’t always nail the era, are by Tilly Grimes.)

Eliza hopes that Janice will be an ally. Janice, halfheartedly gaslighting her, hopes that Eliza will tone it down. She doesn’t, and that’s the fun of Ms. Rebeck’s revenge fantasy, which lets no one off the hook for their bad behavior.

The cast is an impressive assemblage of talent, and Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. Helgenberger both do fine. Oddly, though, the flashiest roles belong to men: the showboating worm Weber and, especially, the toxic Stu — hardly the only villain here, but the one with the most power, and he relishes abusing it.

Playing Stu is a tricky challenge that Mr. Young expertly meets, giving a comic performance with just enough bite that we can’t dismiss Stu as a buffoon. His body language — the way he cringes in not-so-mock fear when he talks about Eliza — is like a cry straight from his psyche.

But Ben (Jim Parrack), a project leader at the firm, is more insidiously harmful. A casual sexist, he’s also a pragmatist, and good work is his principal concern. He knows Eliza could help with that, but he’s not the kind of guy to make waves. Instead he goes along.

In the production’s bi-level set, by Narelle Sissons, we get a cross-section view of the office. With lumber and metal seams exposed at the edges, we see how this structure was built. It’s a metaphor for what Ms. Rebeck’s play does: rips away the smooth surfaces and lays bare the skeleton, where it’s plain that the rot is in the bones.